This research report is an attempt to position Michael MacGarry’s sculptures within a context of critiques of nationalisms in the postcolonial state. Looking specifically at Zulu and Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, I consider the constructed nature of nationalism and highlight how it is always an imposition of rigidity upon the organic flow of peoples through spaces. By exploring the theme of the phallic signifier in conjunction with multiple conceptions of the fetish in Michael MacGarry’s work, I explore the idea of competing nationalisms in South Africa. My research is a contribution to the existing literature on MacGarry in that it explores these readings of his work through a psychoanalytic framework. I show how MacGarry’s work engages psychoanalytic discourses in relation to social and political formations in order to critique the construction and reproduction of state control through representations of the body politic, a concept articulated by Nicholas Mirzoeff (1993). MacGarry has created his sculptures in such a way that they can be read through all major registers of the fetish: ethnographic, Marxist, psychoanalytic and Modernist

The central argument of this thesis asserts that in the process of challenging dominant subject positions, such as whiteness, performance creates the possibilities for new or alternative arrangements of desire. It examines how the creative process of desire is forestalled (reified) by habitual representations of whiteness as a privileged position, and proposes that performance can be a valid form of resistance to static conceptions of race and subjectivity. The discussion takes into account how the privilege of whiteness finds representation through forms of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism in the post apartheid context. The analysis focuses on the work of white South African artists whose work offers a critique from within the privileged “centre” of whiteness. The research is situated within the inter-disciplinary field of performance studies entailing a reading and application of critical texts to the analysis. Alongside this qualitative methodology surfaces a subjective dialogue with the information presented on whiteness. Part Two includes an analysis of Steven Cohen’s The Cradle of Humankind (2011), Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A (2011) and Michael MacGarry’s LHR-JNB (2010). Each section examines the way in which the respective works engage in a questioning of whiteness through performance. Part Three investigates South African rap-rave duo, Die Antwoord and how their appropriation of Zef interrogates desires for an essential authenticity. Part Four focuses on my own performance practice and the proposed value of engaging with a form of practice-led research. This is particularly relevant in relation to critical race studies that require a level of self-reflexivity from the researcher. It presents an analysis of the work entitled Villain (2012) as a disturbance of theatrical desire through a process of ‘becoming’. This notion of meaning and identity as ‘becoming’ is argued as a strategy to challenge prevailing modes of perception which can possibly restore the production of desire to the viewer. The thesis concludes with the notion that performance can offer a mode of immanent ethics which is significant in creating both vulnerable and critical forms of whiteness.